


Run Boy Run, Until Home is Just a Dream

by Morphologist



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Chronic Pain, Dissociation, Flashbacks, Gen, Hearing Voices, One Shot, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Survival Training (or lack thereof)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-12-31 23:15:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18323921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morphologist/pseuds/Morphologist
Summary: Five wanted to prove that he could do it- that he could actually time travel. Not only that, he was sick of being cooped up in a home where his worth depended on what he could do and not who he was. He was tired of being seen as a runt whose ability was more about evasion than fighting. But little did he expect that he'd end up years in the future, the apocalypse only a few days behind him. Lost and confused, he struggles to make it through the first few days of his realization that no one is left and for the first time in his life, he is truly on his own. He remembers random points from before he left home, and regrets some things he never said, all while trying to figure out how to survive in a new and confusing world.





	Run Boy Run, Until Home is Just a Dream

The first two decades, Five wandered in and out of a painful reality that felt more like a merciless delusion. The world was a broken landscape as desolate and foreign as another planet. The cockroaches frightened him, as they skittered about, the newer generations grew to at least three or four times their size due to not having any natural predators aside from himself and a handful of mutated wildlife. The first few days were not to be his most dangerous, but they certainly were the ones in which he felt most alone. 

  
Five knew how to survive unfavorable conditions. But nothing nearly as unfavorable as this. He tried to remember most of his training, and implemented it when he saw fit. He originally started out looking for shelter because there was nothing else he could do. Looking for some kind of shelter, but his old definition of "shelter" had to change. Over the first few nights, shock froze him like a catatonic homing pigeon to the estate of his father, and he shivered in the midst of its smoldering ruins, hoping against hope that the wind would give enough life to those embers so that they could bloom into flames again and engulf him along with the corpses of his siblings. 

  
_Maybe that way, I can be with everyone else._  
_Maybe that way, this nightmare will finally end._

  
But it didn’t. It wouldn’t end for many, many years.  
Luckily, he did not know that yet.

He didn't know that someone raised as a mouse would learn to behave like a lion. 

  
Five eventually broke out of his rut of living within the wreckage of the Hargreeves mansion, when an earthquake caused what was left of the structure to crumble. Shaking violently, he dashed- or rather, teleported repeatedly- five blocks over. The same thing. Ten blocks over. The same thing. Twenty blocks.  
Abandoned landmarks. Dilapidated, abandoned, ruins. Charred bodies hanging out of windows of shops he used to go to with Vanya and Ben. The park where he used to pester Diego as he tried to teach himself how to skateboard. Luther used to like the Greek restaurant down by the clocktower, and Allison preferred the Chinese restaurant on 40th. All of it shattered in an instant, and Five didn't understand why. It was as if his last thirteen years of life was a fairytale, and this was reality. That nothing existed. Nothing ever mattered. 

Charred bodies lay frozen where they tried to crawl to safety. Here and there a baby stroller with the baby still inside, and the parents splayed on the sidewalk next to it. Everything silent, empty, abandoned, save for whatever critters survived the initial cataclysm to overtake the mess with their hunger for hardy thistles and weeds. Save for the sound of crackling flames and the ground that shook from time to time. Now frequent seismic activity became the new normal, and every time the ground rumbled, Five teleported out from the structure he was scrounging through for food, just in time to avoid it crumbling.

  
After wrenching himself from the Hargreeves mansion, he wandered like a dumbstruck pigeon. He cried like the little lost child he really was.  
Thirteen and overconfident, suddenly thirteen and terrified out of his mind.

  
_Even the mansion is gone. Vanya, Ben, Klaus… Luther, Allison, Diego… Pogo, Mom… But I’m here. This can’t be right. There has to be a mistake. Maybe I accidentally took a red pill and this is just a dream about the Matrix, except it looks like the Walking Dead, except in the Walking Dead there were more survivors right, oh god what the hell am I saying,  why am I the only one here…_

  
For a while, he’s terrified that maybe all the bodies around him are only sleeping.  
But night after night, sleeping in view of one, staring at it until he closed his eyes, convinces him otherwise.  
They’re everywhere, but that’s all they are- simply deceased. 

  
Unfortunately, it takes him much longer to accept that he isn’t somehow trapped in a dream. He looks for that signal that lies in every lucid dream, that trigger from which he can blow the entire surreal paracosm apart. But when he pinches himself, and starts to prick himself with barbed wire and the edges of cracked bricks, the sky remains a haze of reddened smog.

  
_I’m not trying hard enough. Maybe the dream started back home. I fell asleep at the dinner table, right? I never stabbed that knife into the table. I never yelled at Dad. Vanya didn’t try to stop me because I never ran away. I’m gonna wake up, and everything’s going to be fine. Klaus will still be dancing around in the hallway at two in the morning in Mom’s heels when he thinks everyone else is asleep. Even Luther and Allison will still bother me with their “you can’t do that’s” and “I told you so’s”. I’ll make Vanya a peanut butter marshmallow sandwich and tell her I’m so, so sorry..._

  
But wires and bricks soon turn to a steak knife, and the next thing he knows, his arm is smarting with pain at the long cut he’s opened across his flesh, and suddenly all instinct points towards scrambling for something more than a bandage. Because he couldn’t have just wanted to do that. No. He’s never been like that. Not like Klaus, crying and yelling when night terrors came to get him, or Diego stammering nonstop when Dad scolds him for missing one target out of fifty, and Ben's tears after a fight in which he let his monster show. _I have my act together._   _Oh god, what did I do. I have my act together. Oh god, it hurts. I'll fix it, I gotta fix it. Why did I do that._

He knows why he did it, but he can't let himself feel that right now. He remembers that look Vanya gave him at the dinner table, right after he slammed that blade into the wood and snarled at his father.  _" Five, don't do it." Why did I do it. Why didn't I listen to her?_   _Did they even remember me? Did they look for me after I was gone? Maybe Dad told them not to look, maybe no one wanted to look, maybe after a couple of years, it's like I never existed..._

Five held his arm perpendicular to the ground as he teleported desperately as far as his straining nerves and muscles would allow, searching for the nearest hospital that would no doubt have something he could use. 

  
_No one can hear me scream. There’s a body lying facedown just ten feet away. There’s another one on that roof, guess someone didn’t have time to jump before whatever gust from the initial cataclysm choked them out. Cars are just... everywhere. How many people saw this coming? Did no one see this coming? It's like they didn't even have enough time to escape..._

  
Five begins to tear up, as the droplets of scarlet trickle from his arm down to the cracked asphalt in front of the hospital. He recognizes that this is not a fatal cut, because the blood is trickling steadily but not pulsing at the source and moving faster or spurting like a ruptured artery wound. He can handle this. It's only a little worse than that time Diego knicked him with a throwing knife from a distance of twenty feet. He decided that despite everything, at this moment in time, he could fix this one mistake if he moved quick enough. 

  
“ Fuck…” this was the place he was checked into after a mission gone wrong. Back then he partially tore a muscle in his knee from a bad fall during a fight with some criminals. A small injury, mostly invisible, but it felt like the end of the world. The doctors suggested a lot of rest and gradual physical therapy, but if things get worse, he may need surgery. He couldn’t keep up with his siblings for months, and everyone was only eleven at the time. The constant training didn’t give him the rest he needed for his knee to mend correctly. Dad believed that if he could still walk fine and run fine without obviously limping, then it wasn’t anything to think about. In fact, Dad believed Five was lying about his leg to skip practice. Five felt both sickened and betrayed that his father didn't believe him, or pretended not to believe just to derive some cruel amusement from the way it made him angry and afraid. All those times Dad made Diego throw knives at him for target practice. All those times he tripped and Diego deliberately missed his head by a hair.

  
“ Not fast enough Five! Do you want your brother to knick you in the eye? Faster! If you lose a limb, boy, then you're not our Number Five, you're _Zero_ , hear me?"

  
_Right, I’m never fast enough. Doesn't matter how many criminals I catch._

  
When Five really got vicious, his siblings hated him for it. Five’s ability to run and evade is such an integral part of how his mind functions, that the thought of lagging behind everyone else during drills. Not being sure of stable footing after teleporting to new spots, left him damn near terrified for his continued safety during dangerous missions where gunfire was involved, on top of a long list of adolescent insecurities. So he began to use dirtier tricks on everyone else, as long as it got him a higher score in the drills. And his fighting style became much more violent and confrontational during missions, to such a point where his siblings told him "maybe you need to chill". His teleportation skills are a godsend, and he’d trade no power in for that ability. With teleportation, he could escape Luther’s punches and kicks, Allison’s mind control, Ben’s inter-dimensional monster, and even Diego’s knife-throwing. But the time travel aspect… he truly ran before he knew how to walk, and now… well…

  
What happens when you run so far away, that there's no home to go back to?

  
Five realized, as he waded his way through the stinking halls of the hospital in search of first aid, filled with the bodies of patients, nurses, and doctors, some putrefying in the exact position they were in when they were still alive, that though times were hard at home among his siblings, nothing outdoes this isolation. Nothing outdoes discovering that no one is left to run away from or _to_ anymore. No one’s there to hear your _voice_. 

The sheer number of decaying bodies in the hospital was overwhelming. The stench made his stomach flip and his head spin. His weaker knee felt especially unstable as he stepped over one sprawled figure after another, and occasionally stepped on some to reach higher places.

  
_I can’t pass out in here among the bodies or I’ll catch something. Oh god, I don’t know what. A parasite? A virus? There’s probably vials of formaldehyde and morphine that’ve been smashed apart. Everything smells wrong. Oh god, why didn't I bring a mask? Right, I'm fucking bleeding. Oh god, I'm still bleeding. Why did I pick up that fucking knife... Why did I stab it into the table... Why did I cut myself... Why did I stop cutting... why didn't I take it a step... no... focus..._

  
He pushed dead nurses out of spinny chairs to reach drawers, some of which required him to find the keys first or something strong enough to pry them open. Cabinets are still fully stocked. Some bodies are charred and crushed by crumbling rock, but some are surprisingly untouched. He grabs tourniquets, bandages, splints, leg braces, ethyl alcohol, even sterile needles, scrambling to find something more for the pain, like aspirin. But he starts to find other things. Stronger pain medications, the kind one would have to pay hundreds for, and he remembers the pain in his knee, the one that never goes away no matter what he takes. The small injury that grew into a chronic problem, and never got the surgery it needed to heal properly. The one that Reginald never acknowledged needed healing at all, even though it worried Five every day, as he hid his anger and his fear behind a studied mask of snide nonchalance.

" You can teleport. If your leg is 'injured', then I suppose you must teleport _faster_. It's nothing, boy. You just want to cut practice."

Five wished he'd fought for his right to get help. But it was too late now. He'd hidden it under layer after layer of hatred and endurance, spitting in the face of any of his siblings who told him they were worried about him, because of how angry and solitary he always seemed to be.

  
_Now no one is here to help me fix it._   _I’m going to have to fix anything else that happens to me completely on my own, from here on out. Or else I’m gonna end up just like them._

  
He sobs because no one can hear him. He feels like a fool for not letting tears show when someone was still there to see them. Even if it was a stranger. Even if it was one of his siblings. Even if it was Diego, the one who Dad always pitted him against, as he sat on the sidelines sipping a cup of tea. Diego never wanted to use Five for target practice. But Diego was afraid of Dad, and that's why he didn't stop, even when Five tripped, Diego threw after him as he crawled and teleported again. When home was like hell and the world outside seemed like an escape, he wished he'd taken accepted the few times someone offered him help, and not tried to hide it all behind his rage. All those times when Vanya knocked on his door late at night and he glared back at her with unshed tears in his eyes. Always observant but always off to the side, never interfering. 

" You know, Five, you can always talk to me."

" About what?" Five countered. 

" I'm worried... that you're not ok."

" Why?" Five hissed.

" I just want you to know, I _care_. Ok?"

Five stared back at her. And the only thing he told her about, was his leg. But she seemed to get the idea, without him putting it into words. To express his gratitude, he smuggled her candies after curfew and brought her books to read when Dad didn't let her leave the house. He didn't understand why his father always kept her separated from the rest. As if she were some kind of trophy best kept in its box for safekeeping, and not on display like the others. It made Five seethe on the inside, but Vanya was the only presence that allowed his hard edges to soften, if only for a moment when no one else was looking.  

  
_If the world outside is in ruins, then the only escape I have now, is inside me._

  
He lets his mind slowly re-conceptualize the future. If worldly-perception is busted then self-perception must remain intact or all hope is lost. Five treats the wound on his arm, best he can. Reading through nurses’ and doctors’ notes, on fallen clipboards and tucked away on dusty shelves. Useful information was in many of those papers. Details on illnesses and the medicines to take for them. Five stuffed as many things as he could, into his pockets and then into first aid kits. 

  
Five tries to block from his mind the fact that every name he stared at was the name of a person who required help not so long ago. He finds information on just about everything. Roaming from one floor to another, pausing by the giant hole that consists of what used to the fifth floor of one of the largest wings of the building. The floor drops away into a direct view of the fourth floor, and his curiosity leads him to the very edge. He stares down.

  
Beneath him, a corpse lies sprawled on the ground next to a toppled operating table. So that’s why the stench is so profuse in this spot. Someone was undergoing surgery, and the carnage of the fallen fourth floor crushed some of the surgeons under piles of cement, piping, and insulation. The patient was somehow knocked askew, landing in a heap on the floor, instead of being crushed under the rubble. He remains open, decomposing, his insides rotted to an oddly shiny brackish amalgam of liquifying organs and putrid bile.

  
Five slowly sat down at the edge of the floor.  
Two thoughts came to rest on his mind:  
_A. At least he died in his sleep_  
_B. I wish I were him._

  
But a small voice in the back of his head whispered:  
_Please. Don’t._

  
Five chuckled quietly under his breath.  
He began to feel drowsy and warm.  
He barely felt the pain of his cut, which still blossomed with a fresh red through the gauze he’d wrapped around it. He swayed a little bit, sat forward, dangling his feet over the edge. He tilted his head and looked down at the wreckage below.  
“ He~ey!” he called out melodiously, “ How’s the _view_ from down there?”  
The small voice in the back of his head hisses:  
_Even now, you dumb runt?_  
Five snarled at the voice and threw a sterile needle over the edge and watched it land with a pathetic tap on the floor below.

  
Somehow, that single sound breaks a dam within his head, and something violent overtakes his entire body. A fearsome shaking and then a sudden limpness. He feels himself lurching... Then suddenly the wind is in his ears, and he realizes he's hurtling straight for the floor. Half a second late, he wakes up from his daze and he screams- throwing all that is left of his scattered self into forming an energy field.

He vanishes for a split second, sucked up into the fabric of space, and then reappears less a foot above the ground, landing so hard on his weaker knee that he cries out as searing hot pain rockets up his leg and stabs needles into his pelvis and spine. He keels forward, the cut in his arm tearing further, leaving his wrist almost limp. His head snaps forward and hits a pile of limp cold flesh. He covers his mouth, stunned by what he’d just touched before yanking back to stare at the maggot-ridden ribcage of the man he’d only moments ago wanted to be.

He grips his chest, unable to breathe, and pushes himself up against the wall with his uninjured arm as he gasps for breath, his entire body more rigid now than trembling. He stays like this, unable to scan the other parts of the room, drawn only to the corpse he’d felt that horrid connection to, as if it were alive and speaking to him from its frozen, silent, state upon the ground. His past flashes unsteadily before his eyes. He recalls the innocence he hardly ever had- giving way to a future that is even more bleak than what he left behind, and the sense of peace he never truly had- replaced with something far lonelier than anything he could ever imagine.

Slowly, his attention is drawn to where he fell from, that overhang thirty feet up. He notices suddenly that the floor above, sports a long jagged line. A crack that stretched all the way to the left wall.

 _If that gives…_  
_I’ll be crushed._  
_That’s a future threat._  
_This dead body is the past._  
_It is not a threat._  
_And it never will be._  
_But that…_

A small seismic tremor would be enough to bring that floor crashing down. He jumps to his feet and gathers up all the items he's gathered. They’re heavy and he knows he needs something better to carry them with, but instead of taking his time to look, he teleports into the hall, then into another hall, and into another hall. He keeps jumping over bodies, trips over one, only to teleport again, and trip again, and teleport again, until he finally reaches the lobby on the ground floor, skidding to a stop before he falls in a stunned and shivering pile.

  
A girl his age lies in front of him, facedown, still wearing her backpack. Must have dropped in for a checkup after school. Her head was bashed in by a brick, her body hardly burned.

He slows down as he’s just about to pass her. And this time, he stares. Very few bodies by this point, merit a gaze that lasts more than a few seconds. 

One of his hands reaches out as if to lift her up or at least move her so she doesn’t have to face the floor. Dizzy, drowsy, and yet adrenalin pumping through his veins at haywire levels, he touches her hand. But withdraws quickly upon realizing the number of flies that swarmed around her head. The backpack is big for someone her age, and he gingerly pulls it off of her limp shoulders. For some reason, he thought that maybe her soul could hear him. Maybe it would come back and grow up to be an adult some day instead of leaving this world in a tiny, helpless body. 

He can’t stand the thought of just leaving her face down. Gently he rolls her onto her back. Then wishes he didn’t as he sees the white, squirming maggots crawl out of her dark, decaying mouth. Her clouded white corneas stare up at him, with an expression of mild surprise. She never comprehended what hit her. And suddenly his mind is hanging over the precipice again and he wishes he'd dug that steak knife deeper into his arm, down to the bone.

  
But a part of him refuses to think that thought again. And that part of him takes over like a tradewind steering a ship. Before he knows it, he's teleported rapidly onto the hospital steps, out into the dry, choking air. He reels, falls to his knees, and curls up at the base of the stairs with his first aid kits and her heavy backpack. Barely able to see straight, trembling with the creeping cold as the temperature begins to drop to record lows for a harvest-less spring, he weakly, but steadily packs his newfound things into the backpack, throwing out the textbooks inside, but keeping the notebooks, most of which aren’t even halfway filled with notes. There are pens and pencils too. At least he will have somewhere to keep records, so at least he can remember the date, time, and place. Maybe even who he used to be.

Five teleports further and further away until he has no energy left, and slumps onto a burnt couch in the middle of a razed townhouse. He covers himself in some relatively clean sheets he stuffed into one of the first aid kits, and doesn’t take the sleeping pills that he probably needs, out of fear that if a disaster strikes, he will sleep through it and be unable to teleport away fast enough. Another reason that swims beneath his consciousness however, is that he's worried the part of him that wishes for this chaos to be over, will take too many pills before he can stop it. 

  
He lies there for a very long time, staring up at the stars. For the first time in a long time, he sees the distant twinkling of stars through the wisps of red haze and smog. He actually  _sees_ them, with alert and gaunt eyes. 

 _I never appreciated this sky before._  
_Hell, I never appreciated anything._  
The voice in his head whispers gently:  
_If you don’t get enough sleep, you won’t be able to teleport anywhere tomorrow._  
He gazes up at the stars and imagines that he has a spaceship that can traverse them.  
_This is not one of Dad’s drills. Or one of his missions. There are no points. I have no escape plan._  
_But I time traveled once. I must be able to do it again._  
_If I have no way out right now…_  
_Then I have to make one._  
_Maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a way back home._  
The voice in his head whispers:  
_Close your eyes, Five._  
_Now you have all the time in the world._  
He let his tears fall until a nightmare far less real, carried him away. 


End file.
